Who
made the first truly modern photographs? Most experts say
that Modernism -- a major shift in art, literature, and music
-- evolved during the first two decades of the twentieth
century. Modernism implies a rejection of previous
conventions in favor of radically different forms of
artistic expression. Often, there is a novel point of view:
a story may be narrated by multiple characters, a Cubist
painting may show different perspectives on the same subject
simultaneously. Where once nature's beauty was thought to be
the most appropriate subject for art, Modernist works
frequently take the gritty world of industry as their theme.

The
advent of photography is often credited with triggering a
revolution in painting. Since the camera could produce such
perfect transcriptions of reality, artists were suddenly forced
to be more than clever copyists of nature. This led them to
such new ideas as Impressionism, and to a new role for
painting as a means of personal expression.

Photography,
too, went through its own dramatic changes as part of the
broader shift to Modernism, as the two images below
demonstrate. On the left, a large-scale photograph from 1896
that was intended to be framed and displayed as an artwork in
the home. On the right, a smaller image taken in 1934 or 1935
by a Japanese businessman who was also a gifted
photographer:

In
the 1896 image, the faux tiles on the floor are a small part
of an elaborately staged scene involving posed models and
carefully selected wardrobes, props, furnishings and a painted
backdrop. On the right, the tiles (at the Taj Mahal)
are the subject of the picture. To be more precise,
the photographer's observation of the tiles is the
subject, and the artistry of the picture is due to the
photographer's ability to capture that pattern in the
dizzying and mesmerizing way he envisioned it.

Most
historians date the beginnings of Modernism in
photography to the Photo-Secession, a movement
founded by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902. Stieglitz and his
followers acknowledged three brilliant photographers who
preceded them by many years: the Scottish partners David
Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson (active 1842 - 1847) and the
remarkable Julia Margaret Cameron (active Great Britain and
Ceylon, 1864 - 1879.)

This
exhibition offers a look at an eclectic group of
images by other photographers -- both famous and unknown--
pictures that break away from the conventions of their
day. Viewed in isolation, they may seem strange or quirky.
Taken together, they show that some photographers
experimented with radically new ideas-- sometimes
decades before those ideas took on the mantle of
Modernism.